<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>exodus by ace_corvid</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27234031">exodus</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ace_corvid/pseuds/ace_corvid'>ace_corvid</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Halloween Countdown Ficfest 2020 [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bad Parents Jack and Janet Drake, But like Lite, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, He's a little bit of a weirdo, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Animal Death, Introspection, Light Angst, Prompt Fic, Skeletons, TDC Unlucky Thirteen 2020, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim Drake-centric, jack and janet drakes a+ parenting, no beta we die like robins</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 21:56:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,263</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27234031</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ace_corvid/pseuds/ace_corvid</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim had always had a strange fascination with dead things. With nothing living around to latch onto, he'd kinda just latched onto the dead instead.</p>
<p>It was just a morbid little interest, nothing of note really. But everything needs practical study. And the Garden was such a perfect playground for such opportunities.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Halloween Countdown Ficfest 2020 [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1978783</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>84</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>TDC's Unlucky Thirteen</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>exodus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>prompt: costumes / <b>skeletons</b></p>
<p>day nine! this is a weird one guys, sorry about that. it's inspired by some of my dave strider headcanons that i'm just strongarming onto Tim so uh yeah. i'm not sure how i feel about this piece, but i thought it was still worth putting out! it has some offputting scenes and themes tho, so be careful in your reading and beware the tags!<br/>enjoy!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="western">Tim had always had a strange fascination with dead things. With nothing living around to latch onto, he'd kinda just latched onto the dead instead.</p>
<p class="western">It was just a morbid little interest, nothing of note really. But everything needs practical study. And the Garden was such a perfect playground for such opportunities.</p>
<p class="western">He'd take small little bodies of animals he'd find in the garden, and try to preserve them. Lizards, sometimes, but mostly insects. Things that were alive, once, and weren't now. He cradled them gently as he carried them, almost instinctually. Like maybe something would be different if someone cared after they died. But how could he change something that wasn't even alive any more?</p>
<p class="western">He never got an answer, for that one,</p>
<p class="western">He was a very smart boy on top of being a very unsupervise<span>d one,</span> who knew a lot more about things that interested than he should. It was like how he knew how to develop his own photos from film, how to build a dark room in his closet, what angles to get for photos to look best. Not to brag, but he knew the identities of the three most secretive vigilantes in the world.</p>
<p class="western">So logically, for Tim, an interest in dead things, meant research.</p>
<p class="western">Tim was a strange child to begin with, now he was just a strange boy who knew a lot about embalming fluid and, well. Death. The process of it after, at least. Decay. Preservation.</p>
<p class="western">He got some bugs, encased in amber for Christmas. There they were, just sat there, frozen in time. What purpose did they serve, scattered on his shelf? What was the point? Did the life they lived give any meaning to how they were displayed after?</p>
<p class="western">That was around the time he started to keep the dead things to see how they decayed. Morbid curiosity after morbid curiosity, deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole he didn't know if he wanted to go down.</p>
<p class="western">He got a clean, white replica skeleton of a lizard off the internet to compare one particular find to. The live one was far more messy, and smelled much worse. It was terrible and slow. He shoved it in a box to forget about, but he just couldn't stop thinking. It made him cry; he couldn't stand to look at it.</p>
<p class="western">Tim didn't want to watch things decay any more, until there was nothing but bones. Who would want memories filled with skeletons?</p>
<p class="western">Just- that poor lizard. Was it really ever alive if all it came to be was dust and bone in a shoebox in Tim's room, nothing more than an awful memory? If it's death had affected Tim more than it's life had?</p>
<p class="western">What would it be like, to die with no one who cared about you?</p>
<p class="western">His empty house had never felt more like a grave.</p>
<p class="western">So rather than trying to keep the dead things, or preserve them, he gave them little funerals instead. He learnt about local ecosystems, so he could talk about how their life had impacted the world a whole lot. How they had been important. How they had been worth it. And then he gave them a little grave marker and buried them in the back garden. So that their bodies could give back to the earth, and continue to matter there.</p>
<p class="western">He never really cried over them, but it was an important ritual. Near routine, really.</p>
<p class="western">On the way back to the house, he'd count his steps in time to his inner mantra.</p>
<p class="western">
  <em>I am important. I matter. I am having an impact. </em>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <em> I am alive.</em>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span>His mind was stuck on the little lizard from the box. He never buried that one. Just threw it out, like it was nothing, and nothing could assuage the guilt. The grief.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span>It moved past a fascination to something he just did. His mother tried to encourage an interest in history and preservation; it matched her archaeology quite well, and he could continue to move Drake Industries in that direction. </span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> She got him a set of bird skulls. Corvidae, petroicidae, paradisaeidae all in a line; neat, clinical, clean. The robin skull had pride of place, right in the middle. It meant something to him that Tim couldn't put a name to.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> But it wasn't the history he'd ever been interested in. Just the process of how things faded from the world, physically and otherwise. And the question of if they'd ever been important in the first place.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> Presumably, nobody had cared about them. Tim thought he knew how that felt, perhaps. So he tried so hard to care about every single one he found, just to give them something, but it was almost meaningless. He just felt numb. He was nearly desensitised to it at this point. </span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> He hated it. He wanted to care </span>
  <em>so much</em>
  <span>, but he was just surrounded by dead things. He couldn't help them, any of them. They were already gone, and nothing he did about it would never make a lick of difference. No matter how many stupid, dumb funerals he held, or how he mourned.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> Mourning was for the living. Not the dead.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> Then he became Robin. And suddenly he could help real, </span>
  <em>alive</em>
  <span>, tangible people. His days weren't occupied by the dead any more. He was important, he mattered, he had an impact. He changed lives, and he was finally living his own.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> When his mother died, grief was a familiar friend, to hold his hand through the misery. It was like a snug coat; it fit a little different, but it was still familiar. And really, it wasn't as if he understood his mother any better than all of those little animals anyway. </span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> She had been a distant figure he couldn't make sense of. The one puzzle he could never solve. And now she was dead. He'd never unravel the mystery, or get to know her better. Never receive one of her sharp eyed glares again, or wither under the weight of her tone. She'd never stroke his hair like she had in the vague memory Tim had of when he was younger. He'd never have a mother again. She'd never love him. He'd never know if she ever did.</span>
</p>
<p class="western"><span> It was the strongest memories of her, the ones where she'd touch his chin and tell him to </span><em>be</em> <em>strong, but be cunning</em><span>, that made him believe: this is what it is to be remembered. To be missed.</span></p>
<p class="western">
  <span> He couldn't help but wonder- who would miss him like this? He had saved plenty of lives, of course, but how many had he made a mark on? The list was short, almost miserably so.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">
  <span> But he was Robin. He could still make a difference. He had to.</span>
</p>
<p class="western">Because with Robin, he wasn't just some kid who had sat in a house and did nothing. He <em>tried</em><span> to have an impact on the things around him, tried to save lives because he was sick of being surrounded by dead things. He worked hard so he could fight, he used his mind to get justice, and tried his damn hardest everyday because life wasn't worth it if he didn't. He wanted to matter. He wanted to be </span><em>alive.</em><span> He wants it all to have meant something.</span></p>
<p class="western"><span> The only thing left to do was push past his limits. Go beyond. Try to become something. </span>It was his job to fight for those who were alive, and it was his routine to care about those who were dead.</p>
<p class="western">Until he himself was just a skeleton in the ground.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>oh boy howdy was that as strange to read as it was to write?</p>
<p>you can find me at:<br/>Tumblr: ace-corvid.tumblr.com<br/>Twitter: twitter.com/ace_corvid<br/>come yell at me!</p>
<p>thank you so much for reading, see you next time! And if you enjoyed this, a comment would really make my day!</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>